Monthly Writers' Recap: April 2017

April is now behind us, and we figured we'd share a recap of the month, along with some exciting announcements. 

Read on for our April highlights. 

April Leaderboards 

Congrats to all of the talented writers atop the leaderboards for April!

Top Contributors by Pageviews for April 2017

Top Contributors by Articles for April 2017

Top Articles for April 2017

Say Hi to Our New Zone Leaders!

We're excited to announce that long-time DZone contributor Daniel Stori is now officially a Zone Leader. Daniel is an extraordinarily talented artist who has written a ton of very popular comics for DZone. His post "Who Killed MySQL? [Comic]" is one of our most viewed and liked pieces of content! Look for more of his hilarious and charming work on DZone in the very near future.

We're also very pleased to welcome Cate Lawrence into the Zone Leader ranks.  Cate is new to the site, but she's already impressed us with the breadth of her knowledge. Her main focus will be on IoT, and her favorite topics include AI, Wearables, and robots. As a freelance tech writer, Cate also covers a ton of cool conferences. We can't wait to read her upcoming posts.

April's Publications

On Monday, April 24th, we released the DZone Guide to Big Data: Data Science and Advanced Analytics. This Guide has been our most successful of 2017, and has already received nearly thirteen thousand downloads. 

In addition, we released three Refcardz this month:

• Getting Started With Appium (NEW)

• RESTful API Lifecycle Management (NEW)

• Using Repository Managers (Updated)

Thanks again to our Refcard and Guide authors. If you interested in writing for a Guide, check out our Editorial Schedule. 

Editor's Picks

Congrats to Tomer Ben David, who not only won in TWO different categories of the Teach Us Tech Sprint contest, but also wrote the most popular article for the month of April. His post "Hadoop Revisited, Part I: Tutorial and Cheat Sheet" earned nearly 45K pageviews throughout the month.

When we launched the Writers' Zone on April 3rd, we didn't expect our contributors to submit their own writing advice. However, that is exactly what happened! We'd like to thank MVB Jo Stichbury of GRAKN.AI for sharing her post "Don't Over 'Utilize' Your Vocabulary" on words NOT to use in your DZone submissions.

We'd also like to give a huge shout-out to Zone Leader James Sugrue. On Monday, May 8th, we'll be launching DZone Jobs, a job board for software development professionals. James was instrumental in helping us test this exciting new product. You can view the beta DZone Jobs site here.

Finally, we'd like to thank Martin Farrell for exemplifying the DZone values of sharing knowledge and helping others to improve. Martin recently posted some encouraging comments on DZone promoting understanding and continuous improvement in technical proficiency.